Butterfly valve design
 

Hi,

Im trying to design a butterfly valve and run some simulations. Ive tried a few ways to get this to work but something always goes wrong.

The problem stems from issues with meshing, this either happens while trying to create a mesh (the meshing does not succeed) or if the meshing succeeds when I move on to set-up (using fluent) the mesh doesn't transfer properly and I get an error: zone surface: invalid thread [2]..

Ive tried to build a butterfly valve by using the enclosure feature, by freezing the butterfly valve and extruding a pipe around it...

Im wondering how one is supposed to model a 3d butterfly valve?

Thanks a bunch!

Maybe you should work with seperate domains (don't know if that exists in Fluent, as I am a CFX user).
I had a comparable problem, trying to model a ball valve. I solved it by creating a pipe domain before the valve, a pipe domain after the valve and a valve domain that was set as rotating domain. The valve domain was quasi shperical, only that I just needed the hole inside the ball, so that the solid part of the Sphere was not meshed. The Spherical domain was then rotated around its symmetry axis by 90 Degrees to simulate an opening of the closed ball valve. I attached some pictures that might help understand what I'm trying to explain.
For your case I wolud imagine something similar. Two (half)pipe domains and in the middle a spherical domain. The spherical domain would then be separated into two semi-sphere domains separated by a gap corresponding to the thickness of your valve.